


Echoes of angels that won't return...

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 01:56:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10584012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: A coda of sorts to Alex and Izzie's official break-up at the end of 'I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked.' Prompt:'Cause I’m fake at the seams, I’m lost in my dreams, And I want you to know, that I can’t let you go. And you're never coming home again, and you're never coming home again.





	

_I want you to go and be happy and not come back._

As the words dissolve, liquid thin in the air between them, he is the first to stand.

Maybe, he thinks, if he stays he'll wind his fingers through hers and lose himself completely in the watery corners of her sad, sad eyes. Never again let go.

He walks, shoulder pressed hard to the wall. Holding him up, bruising, in the absence of his own cracking, crumbling self resolve.

_(Izzie, Izzie, Izzie...)_

Decisions made and voiced.

Silently retracted, _please_.

She listens. He didn't think she would. She leaves. He doesn't think he really wants her to.

A foreign pounding takes up permanent residence in the space where his heart and lungs used to live. The world tilts on its axis. A little left of centre.

Never quite rights itself again.

Meredith's eyes betray her seething fury. It's on him now, he knows. This time it was his decision. One more fragmented piece chipped away from splitting seams. He'd thrown himself, unceremoniously, onto his own proverbial sword, wounded pride and all.

But the blade was blunted, and nothing good ever came from misguided martyrdom.

Nothing except loneliness and regret and a hundred other screaming realities that he can't bring himself to name.

He counts the days like they're sheep. Watches them pass him by from a distance, dissociated and blurry. He uses Lexie's body to warm the feet and inches of cold sheet at his back. She uses him, he's fairly sure, to prove an increasingly meaningless point. He just shrugs one shoulder and rolls over into the black of the night.

He's always half the distance through a closing door. On his way, he says, but going no where fast. Three, eight, seventeen steps behind and still losing.

Years melt and paint peels back in thick onion layers, until there is nothing real left underneath. Cynicism and self doubt become walls to hide behind, exhaustion his only means of escape and evade. It works well until it doesn't.

Then he drinks. Swirls of amber in a shallow glass, the colours all wrong but the images raw, vivid. Like yesterday. Like tomorrow. Like forever.

She moves on. He knows because he listens, not because he asks. _I want you to go and be happy and not come back._

It's a fallacy he can never forgive himself for. A haunting soundtrack to his own echoing existence.

He falls, one shapeless cloud at a time.

End over end.

And he can't help but think that the one time she chose to listen to him was the one time he wished with a grim self loathing that she'd completely ignore him.

The one time he wished that she'd see through his white-knuckled attempt at self-preservation and stay anyway.

But they rarely stay anyway and she was to prove no exception.

_I want you to go and be happy and never come back._

He shoulders away from the wall and stands alone, unsteady on numb feet and learning to swim amongst the reaches of an oppressive realisation that says she's not coming back.

She's never coming back.


End file.
